Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy/New Worlds: German and Austrian Art 1890-1914
2005; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1756-1183
Autores ResumoGerman Studies across the Disciplines Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy. Los Angeles: LACMA/University of California Press, 2001. 339 pp. $35.00 paperback. New Worlds: German and Austrian An 18900 -1914. New York: Neue Galerie/Yale, 2001. 600 pp. $75.00 hardcover. In a 2001 conference at the Clark Art Institute, The Two Art Histories: TheMuseumand the University, museum and university scholars met to discuss a perceived rift between the academy and the museum. The museum is perceived to be a site of popularization, Impressionist blockbusters, and too little ground-breaking, new scholarship. But this can hardly be said of the two exhibition catalogues under review here, each of which had its genesis in an institution dedicated to the presentation and preservation of Central European art. Expressionist Utopias draws on works from the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for Expressionist Studies (opened 1987) while New Worlds is the catalogue for the inaugural exhibition of the Neue Galerie, New York's recent addition to the Museum Mile dedicated to Austrian and German art from 1890 to 1940. Each institution has invited some of the best historians of Central European art to contribute essays to their well-illustrated catalogues. To have a combination of excellent scholarship and color reproductions in relatively affordable publications is a boon for the field of Central European art, which is generally less well known to the American museum-going public than the art of France. Expressionist Utopias is the catalogue for an exhibition held in 1993-94 at the Los Angeles County Museum, and was reissued in 2001 with an enlightening interview with architect Wolfgang Prix, whose firm designed the installation. The catalogue and essays as a whole give us a sense of the Utopian and dystopian aspects of German Expressionism. Edited by the exhibition curator, Timothy Benson, it includes six essays by experts on painting, works on paper, architecture, and film, followed by a catalogue, biographies and bibliographies for the artists, as well as translations of related documents on Utopias. These manifestos, essays, and letters are by Siegfried Kracauer, Georg Simmel, Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut, and Ernst Bloch, among others. In Fantasy and Functionality: The Fate of Benson discusses the concept of Utopia as no place and good place in a synthetic history of the avant-garde's paradoxical and productive relationship with this concept. Utopia also had its conservative side as artists moved from a visionary 'no place' of Utopia to the real conditions of the metropolis where the fantasies of the avant-garde turn into the pragmatic architecture of the industrialized metropolis. Reinhold Heller contributes an essay on the Utopian aspects of the artists' colony, which has its roots in Romanticism. Expressionist artists like the members of Die Briucke sought to form their Utopias in the contemporary life of the studio and in Freikorperkultur, painting scenes of nude bathers in the outdoors as a natural paradise. Theirs was a Utopia existing everywhere and nowhere, experimental and elusive, primarily existing in the studio environment and the fictions of their art. Anton Kaes contributes a thoughtful essay on the contradictory steely Romanticism of Fritz Lang's film Metropolis, which Hitler and Goebbels found appealing and analogous to their notions of combining technology with blood and soil. Rather than collapsing this chain of ideas into an explanation of the film's potential meaning (and finding fault with it), Kaes situatesMetropolis in its historical context, observing that its ambivalences and idealism are an 'historically explainable and valid attempt to fight those tendencies of modernity that have undeniably shown themselves to be cruel and dehumanizing/ (164) Kaes' essay is a model for film historians; he treats the film as a visual medium, connecting it to larger cultural themes, while remaining methodologically connected to historical explanations. …
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